George W. Orwell

A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom forwards virtually all of its Internet traffic into a “secret room” to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell’s 1984.

Appearing on MSNBC’s Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all Internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company’s San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access — via a cable splitting device.

“My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room,” said Klein. “And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room — and we’re talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet.”